The Book of Strange New Things (40 page)

‘No longer dead,’ Lover Five explained, or maybe that was the title of her drawing.

Lover Five may have been first with her sketch, but she was not the first to get a painting mounted on the church ceiling. That distinction belonged to Jesus Lover Sixty-Three, an extremely shy individual who communicated mainly in gestures, even among his (her?) own people. The Oasans were scrupulous in their respect for others, and gossip was not their style, but Peter gradually got the message that Lover Sixty-Three was disfigured or malformed in some way. Nothing specific was said, only a general sense that Lover Sixty-Three was a pathetic character, soldiering on as though he was normal when everyone could see he wasn’t. Peter tried his best, without staring, to see what the problem might be. He noted that the flesh of Lover Sixty-Three’s face appeared less raw, less glistening, than other people’s. It looked as if it had been dusted with talc, or briefly cooked, like fresh chicken whose pinkness fades to white after a few seconds in boiling water. In Peter’s eyes, this made him, if anything, a little easier to behold. But to his neighbours, it was evidence of a pitiable disability.

Whatever Lover Sixty-Three’s handicap was, it didn’t affect his artistic skill. His painted panel, already affixed to the church ceiling directly above the pulpit, was the sole finished contribution so far, and any subsequent offerings would have to be impressive indeed to equal its quality. It glowed like a stained-glass skylight, and had an uncanny ability to remain visible even when the sun was on the wane and the church’s interior grew dim, as though the pigments were luminescent in their own right. It combined bold Expressionist colours with the intricate, exquisitely balanced composition of a medieval altarpiece. The figures were approximately half life-sized, crowded onto a rectangle of velvety cloth that was bigger than Jesus Lover Sixty-Three.

His choice of Biblical scene was Thomas the Doubter’s meeting with his fellow disciples when they tell him they’ve seen Jesus. A most unusual subject to tackle: Peter was almost certain that no Christian painter had ever attempted it before. Compared to the more sensational finger-in-the-wound encounter with the resurrected Christ, this earlier episode was devoid of visual drama: an ordinary man in an ordinary room voices his scepticism about what a bunch of other ordinary men have just told him. But in Lover Sixty-Three’s conception, it was spectacular. The disciples’ robes – all in different colours, of course – were scorched with tiny black crucifixes, as though a barrage of laser beams from the radiant Christ had sizzled brands onto their clothing. Speech bubbles issued from their slitty mouths, like trails of vapour. Inside each bubble was a pair of disembodied hands, in the same starfish design as Lover Five had used. And in the centre of each starfish, the eye-shaped hole, adorned with an impasto glob of pure crimson which could either be a pupil or a drop of blood. Thomas’s robe was monochrome, unmarked, and his speech bubble was a sober brown. It contained no hands, no images of any kind, only a screed of calligraphy, incomprehensible but elegant, like Arabic.

‘This is very beautiful,’ Peter had said to Jesus Lover Sixty-Three when the painting was formally delivered.

Lover Sixty-Three lowered his head. Assent, embarrassment, acknowledgement, pensiveness, pleasure, pain, who knew?

‘It also reminds us of a very important truth about our faith,’ said Peter. ‘A truth that’s especially important in a place like this, situated so very far away from where Christianity began.’

Lover Sixty-Three stooped lower still. Perhaps his head weighed too heavy on his neck.

‘Jesus allowed Thomas to put his finger into His wounds,’ said Peter, ‘because He understood that some people cannot believe without proof. It’s a natural human response.’ Peter hesitated, wondering if the word ‘human’ needed qualification, then decided it must be obvious by now that he regarded the Oasans as no less human than himself. ‘But Jesus was aware that it would not be possible for everyone, everywhere, forever afterward, to see and touch Him the way Thomas did. So He said, “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” And that’s us, my friend.’ He laid a hand gingerly on Lover Sixty-Three’s shoulder. ‘You and me, and all of us here.’

‘Yeสี,’ said Lover Sixty-Three. For him, that constituted fulsome conversation. A group of other Jesus Lovers, who’d accompanied him to the church for the delivery of the painting, made trembling motions with their shoulders. Peter realised that this was probably their equivalent of laughter. Laughter! So they did have a sense of humour after all! He was constantly learning important things of this kind, things which made him feel that the gulf between him and these people was growing shorter with every sunrise.

Lover Sixty-Three’s painting was solemnly raised and affixed to the ceiling, inaugurating the church’s devotional display. The next day, it was joined by Jesus Lover Twenty’s interpretation of Mary Magdalene being purged of her seven devils. The devils – ectoplasmic vapours with vaguely feline shapes – exploded from her torso like fireworks, ignited by Jesus, who stood behind Mary in a spread-armed pose. It was a cruder piece of work than Lover Sixty-Three’s, but no less strong, and it, too, glowed with an unfeasible luminescence.

The next day, no one brought a painting, but they did bring Peter a bed, to replace the bundle of rags and nets he’d been sleeping on since his hammock had come down. The Oasans had accepted his hammock unquestioningly, and would have been quite prepared to worship with it dangling in their midst, but Peter had cut it down when he judged the church was so close to finished now that the hammock marred its dignity. The Oasans, noting that their pastor did not necessarily require to hang suspended in order to be comfortable, had quietly constructed a bed for him, according to their usual bathtub/coffin template, albeit larger, shallower and less crammed with swaddly cotton. It was carried across the scrubland to the church, ushered through the door and installed right behind the pulpit, without any pretence that it was anything other than a bed. During the first prayer meeting after its arrival, Peter joked that if he got too tired while speaking, he could always just fall backwards and have a sleep. His congregation nodded indulgently. To them, it was a sensible idea.

On the morning that Grainger came to fetch him, Peter awoke to anticipation. Anticipation of the rain. For the natives, this was not unusual; rain occurred at predictable intervals, and they’d had a lifetime to accustom themselves to its rhythms. But Peter was not so attuned, and the rains always caught him by surprise. Until now. He stirred in his bed, slippery with sweat, thick-headed, squinting from the window-shaped rectangle of light that warmed his chest. Yet, dazed as he was, he knew at once that he must lose no time coming to the surface or trying to recall his dreams or continuing to rack his brains for a pronounceable alternative to ‘Baptist’, but that he should get up and go outside.

The rains were about a quarter of a mile away, gaining ground fast. They truly were
rains
, plural. Three colossal networks of water were advancing independently, separated by substantial spaces of clear air. Each network had its own internal logic, replicating and reassembling its glittering patterns over and over, shifting slow and graceful like one of those complex computer graphics that purport to show a city or a spider-web in three dimensions from all angles. Except that here, the screen was the sky, and the display was an awe-inspiring vista on a par with an Aurora Borealis or a nuclear mushroom cloud.

If only Bea could see this
, he thought. Every day, provoked by some event or other, he regretted her absence. It wasn’t a physical yearning –
that
came and went, and it was at an ebb just now – but rather an uneasy awareness that a huge, complicated phase of his life was passing by, crowded with significant and deeply emotional experiences, none of which Bea was seeing, none of which she was remotely involved in. And again now: these three great shimmering veils of rain, swirling majestically across the plains towards him: they were indescribable, and he would not describe them, but seeing them would leave a mark on him, a mark that would not be left on her.

The rains covered what was left of the distance in minutes. By the time the settlement was gently engulfed, Peter could no longer perceive them as three separate entities. The air all around him was ecstatic with water, bursting with it. Silvery lariats of droplets lashed against the ground, lashed against him. He remembered how, when he was a kid, he would play with the girl at the end of the street and she’d spray him with the garden hose and he’d jump to avoid it but get caught anyway, which was the whole point and pleasure of it. Knowing that it would get you, but that you wouldn’t come to harm and you’d love it really.

Soon he was dripping wet and slightly dizzy from watching the patterns swirl before him. So, to give his eyes a rest, he did what the Oasans did: he stood with his head craned back, mouth open, and let the rain fall straight in. Drink the downpour direct from source. It was a sensation which, back home, every child attempts to indulge in once or twice before learning that there’s no point standing there gaping like an idiot, straining to catch raindrops which are too far apart and too small. But here, the undulating arcs of the rainfall meant that you would get nothing for a moment or two and then a generous sprinkle, a splash on the tongue. Moreover, the taste of melon was stronger when it came straight out of the sky. Or maybe he only imagined this.

He stood for a long while, getting drenched, drinking the rain. Water filled his ears, and the auditory world inside his head became muted. Rarely had he felt such mindless satisfaction.

But rain, on the Oasan settlement, was not a selfish experience. It was communal and it prompted communal action. Just as the chants of the muezzin called Muslims to prayer, the rains called the Oasans to work. Hard work. Now that Peter knew just how hard, he insisted on labouring in the field alongside the Oasans, putting his muscle into helping them.

Whiteflower was not the only crop the Oasans cultivated. There was also a cotton-like substance called สีค๙, which erupted from the soil in sticky white froth that quickly hardened into a fibrous weed. It was from this weed that the Oasans’ nets, shoes and clothing were derived. Then there was คڇสีค, a kind of moss which grew at an amazing rate, completing its metamorphosis from specks of mould to verdant fluff in a single afternoon. What was it for? He had no idea, but he learned how to harvest it.

As for whiteflower, there was, he learned, a catch to its wondrous versatility: each plant had to be individually and frequently assessed to ascertain what stage of its growth cycle it had reached, because different things could be made with it depending on when it was pulled from the ground. On a given day, a plant’s roots might be good for ‘mushroom’ soup, its fibre good for ‘liquorice’, its flowers good for bread, its nectar good for ‘honey’, whereas on another day, its roots might be good for ‘chicken’, its fibre good for rope, its flowers good for ‘custard’, its dried sap good for ‘cinnamon’, and so on. Timing was most crucial straight after rainfall, because that’s when the oldest plants yielded their best. Morbidly porous, they swelled with water, lost what little stiffness they had left, slumped to the earth, and would swiftly begin to rot if they were not plucked out. Found in time, they were the most useful agricultural product of all, for they provided yeast.

Aware that the Oasans would already be on their way to the field, Peter stopped guzzling the rain and walked back into the church. Water ran down his legs as he crossed the floor, and each step left a paddle-shaped puddle. He strapped on his sandals (the yellow boots were too precious for filthy labour), combed his hair flat against his scalp, took a few bites of a dark-brown pumpernickel-like substance the Jesus Lovers called Our-Daily-Bread, and set off.

The rain dwindled as he walked. The watery swirls still made distinctive shapes in the air but some of the arcs softened into vapour, and there was less force, less impact on the skin. He knew the downpour would last only a few more minutes, and then the sky would clear for a good while – if ‘clear’ was the right word for a sky that was always saturated with moisture. After that, the rains would return once more, then lay off for twenty hours or so, then return twice more again. Yes, he was getting the hang of it now. He was almost a local.

Three hours later, if he’d been counting hours, which he most definitely hadn’t, Peter returned from the whiteflower fields. His hands and forearms were stained whitish-grey with the powdery slough of the harvested plant. The front of his dishdasha, from chest to stomach, was so filthy from the armfuls of whiteflower he’d been loading onto the carry-hammocks that the inky crucifix could scarcely be seen. Further down, where his knees had made contact with the ground, the fabric was slimy with sap and soil. Specks of pollen fell from him as he walked.

Emerging from the outskirts of the settlement, he began to cross the stretch of prairie between the town and the church. More conscious of his ridiculously grubby state with every step, he peered up into the sky, looking for signs of the next burst of rain, which was due very soon. The rain would rinse him clean. All he need do was stand naked under the deluge and rub his hands over his flesh, maybe with the aid of the bar of soap he’d brought from home. He would stand just outside his church and the rain would wash him and when he was clean he would hold up his clothes and the rain would wash them too. After that there would be a long sunny spell, excellent drying weather.

As he strode across the wasteland his eyes were focused squarely on the silhouetted church building, and, in anticipation of reaching it, he yanked off his garment and flapped it a couple of times to shake off the excess dirt.

‘Whoah!’ called a voice.

He swung round. About twenty metres to his left, parked alongside the wall whose welcoming graffiti had long vanished, stood the USIC van. And, leaning against the vehicle’s grey metal hull, with a large water-bottle clutched to her breast, stood Grainger.